Euro 2016: Romania v Switzerland Betting Preview

Romania will probably feel a hard done by not to have taken anything from their opening game with France having put up a far tougher resistance than many expected. Switzerland, meanwhile, were slightly fortunate to hang on for their opening win over Albania as they failed to make the most of their chances. It’ll be another tough test for the Romanians here as while rate these two as the second and third best in Group A the gap between the two is bigger in terms of our gradings than between the second and third best sides in any other group.

Romania were unbeaten in qualification for Euro 2016 so we perhaps shouldn’t be too surprised that they made life so difficult for the favourites France. Another defeat here will leave them struggling to qualify so they might be forced to attack a bit more than usual. However, we probably won’t see a full reversal of the defensive approach that saw them draw 0-0 in three of their final five qualifiers as a point here and a win over Albania in their final game should still be enough to send them through. They struggled to score more than once in qualifying but the conceded just twice in 10 matches, with 9/10 having fewer than three goals. So their best bet for getting something out of this game will probably be to keep things tight at the back.

Switzerland have won eight of their last nine competitive matches following their win over Albania and six of those have come to nil, while their only failure came against the one side ranked above them.
At European Championships since 1992 there have been 74 matches where we’ve had one side ranked 10-30 places higher and that team has won 55% while losing 20%. Furthermore, they’ve won 12 of 16 games at the group stage when they’d won their previous match.

These stats suggest there is plenty of value on Switzerland here and we expect them to play with greater confidence having got the opening-game nerves out of the way. So the Swiss win looks a good bet. Away from the match outcome, Under 2.5 looks a fair price but nothing to get too excited about and we’d prefer to combine that with the match outcome to get the Switzerland Win/Under 2.5 double at 4.0.